Jottings of Vishal

I've been talking about how on-device ML models may be used by third party apps to profile users' data even when end-to-end encrypted since 2019.

I'd previously written two articles detailing how this may be done. I conducted experiments to show how efficient and silent this profiling could be. Read these on my blog.

Part 1: Encrypted, But Not Invisible: How Apps Could Use On-Device ML to Profile You

Part 2: On-Device LLMs & Your Encrypted Data: The Profiling Risk Amplified

In the light of the latest WhatsApp lawsuit, I revisited this. Read more below.

Part 3: The WhatsApp Lawsuit and a Tangent on What's Technically Possible

Debugging code is like being a detective in a crime movie where you're also the murderer.

Something new is brewing! Take a peek at the preview!

Hypnotrochoid

Something in the works!

Undeniable proof that LLMs have social anxiety just like humans.

/s

I'm recording the Jottings intro video! Stay tuned! 🚀

I'm making an intro video for Jottings!

Stay tuned!

ControlHub now has widgets on both home & lock screens! See your stats at a glance without opening the app! v1.3.0

/ralph-wiggum:ralph-loop combined with /speckit.implement is a game changer. Especially after launching claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions.

Use Speckit's specify, clarify, plan, and tasks to provide all required context and acceptance criteria for the story. Ensure the implementation plan uses well-parallelized sub-agent spawning as the execution mechanism.

The ralph-loop then drives execution, recursively enforcing the spec and iterating on the workflow until everything is dialed in and correct.

/ralph-loop best works for things like running tests and iteratively fixing bugs or build/compile issues.

Or just /ralph-loop in Claude Code.

/ralph-loop "<prompt>" --max-iterations <n> --completion-promise "<text>"

🚀

while :; do cat prompt.md | claude -p --dangerously-skip-permissions; done

Works remarkably well when prompt contains proper boundary and output necessary conditions and it gives some information to the agent about storing memory in a file.

After some boring but fruitful reverse engineering, ControlHub now supports ControlD's Analytics 2.0. Finally!

Changelog

Highly recommended: Chonak Rava Fry thali at Ramesh Restaurant, Anjuna, Goa.

In Barefoot, Goa, Akuri is the best start to the day and an even better precursor to a siesta.

My site has a fun new interactive banner to show off nihil.codes. Take a look :)

nihil.codes has a new skin! Completely redesigned with threejs. Take a look!

Sugar withdrawal is quite something.

Apple Music needs a Picture-in-Picture mode for Live Lyrics.

After all that networking wrangling, DynamoDB being down in us-east-1 gave me a minor-panic.

Update: AWS says there are issues with multiple services. There goes my morning's productivity streak!

Spent two tense days wrangling a complex Cloudflare–AWS networking setup. Multiple customer-owned hosted zones converging into a single SaaS domain with automated verification, certificate provisioning, and dynamic routing. Claude Code came through this morning. Impressed.

I've been thinking. Seating, in general, sucks! More thoughts will follow.

Do hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes pose a fundamentally contradictory challenge to monospace font designers?

It's genuinely good food when it doesn't allow you to be bothered by how shitty the place is.

— Rahul's (my brother) insightful yardstick.

Apple’s Spatial Scene does again what Live Photos did for photos: adds another dimension to memories.

Only gripe: mirrors break the illusion. Reflections stay flat, glitching like a game whose graphics engine is just slightly off.

Some movies fade once you “know.” The genius of Arrival is that rewatching it isn't redundancy. Every viewing becomes an act of homage that mirrors the film's own architecture.

Those who know, know.

The short story it is loosely based on—Story of Your Life, although quite different from the movie, is also worth a read.

AutoMix on iOS 26 Apple Music is surprisingly very good!

Claude Code requires extra instructions and hooks to do documentation lookups for swift/iOS frameworks. It constantly fails to check typealiases, misses braces when refactoring, and needs to be shown the newer way to do things, given how swift and iOS changes each year. For now, I have made it map out common pitfalls into a file so it doesn't keep failing, looking up repeatedly, and fixing for the same things. For any parameter or type outside of this map, it does a documentation search before proceeding.

A pedestrian-friendly horn would go a long way in India. Sure, reducing honking is the real fix. But inside AC cars, horns are muffled; outside, they're deafening. The class divide echoes loudest in decibels.

Live activities on Mac is a welcome addition

Color fringes, refractions, and distortions. Beautiful chromatic aberrations on iOS 26!

Hipster breakfast 101: watermelon & cantaloupe cofermented coffee + dill pickle seasoned dosa.

Breakfast is now a think piece.

And yet, as the world changes, I am neither stuck in time nor rushing to catch the first wagon. I prefer to stand with one foot forward and the other lingering behind. In that spread, in that gradient, there is a kind of depth—holding context from what was while venturing into what is becoming. It brings with it discomfort, the ache of missing what once was, but that is simply the cost of change.

Remembering is how we soften that cost, how we keep the past alive even as we move forward.

Taking a flight has always felt like one of the last rituals of the human condition where disconnection was still possible. There is something quietly bittersweet about it. The last texts sent, the goodbye calls made, the soft “I will miss yous” offered before the world slips out of reach. Then comes the waiting: loved ones tracking your path across the sky, sending their messages only when they imagine you’ve landed, when they believe you’ve found your signal again. For a few suspended hours, life allows a rare interlude, an enforced distance, a pocket of solitude in an always-available world.

But with the spread of onboard Wi-Fi, even this gentle distance, this small modern human ritual of absence, is beginning to vanish.

I wrote about a man I saw on the streets, walking by himself, enjoying an ice cream. We shared a quick glance and a smile. It's a quick one. Read below.

When I was little, our 40-year-old house felt haunted in ways only a child can believe. If anything so much as shifted or creaked on its own, I'd freeze in terror. My mother reminded me of that today, as we sat in the very same house, now older and renovated but still full of memory. She looked at the robot vacuum gliding across the floor and said, “Isn't it strange? Back then, an object moving by itself was the scariest thing. Now it's just everyday life.” In her words was the weight of a whole generation of change.

Latest coffee haul from the americas!

AI coding tools are the new LEGO for adults. They are so much fun, and have truly shortened the gratification loop for hobby projects!

Jottings.me now supports cache-busting and custom tags in headers!

Some people buy land, some others buy domain names.

There’s a quiet joy in a product that feels right in your hand—solid, balanced, with just the right heft.

(3/3) At the foundation are two levers: compute and the supply chain that feeds it—energy, water, bandwidth, silicon. Models will commoditize; differentiation shifts to orchestration, data, and the scale and efficiency of compute. In industrial-revolution terms, more compute is simply a larger labor force—only this time, the workers are digital.

(2/3) That moment marks the birth of an AI-native operating system—AIOS. The intelligence allocates and controls compute across local devices and the networked cloud. Interfaces stop being fixed artifacts. Each “OS” is generated for the person using it, shaped by their goals and the resources at hand—not by a handful of vendors or a static FOSS baseline. Hyper-local. Hyper-personal. Whatever the user needs, within what the system can supply.

(1/3) The era of live, fully AI-generated app experiences is close. You state an intent; the system comprehends it, plans the work, queries and fuses data from many sources, and responds in whatever form fits best—text, voice, visuals, or something new. Caching won’t just store outputs. It will preserve entire execution graphs: the plan, the data stitching, and the interface itself.

Do you want a personal microblog just like mine? Jottings.me is live! 🚀

Reach out to me to reserve your username and get your own microblog!

Jottings now emits 3 feeds! Follow for updates! RSS 2.0: /rss.xml Atom 1.0: /atom.xml JSON Feed: /feed.json

You can’t be a market purist and anti–walled gardens. Pick a lane. Enclosure, lock-in, and moats are features of unchecked capitalism, not bugs.

15 years of Vaibhav Food Canopy and I'm still convinced they make the best Mysore style masala dosas on the planet. Seriously life-making stuff.

NextHub v1.1.1 is out! Finally has support for dark and tinted icons along with the default light icon

Record player ✔️ Film cameras ✔️ Theremin (🤞🏼soon) My transformation into peak analog aesthetic is proceeding exactly as the algorithm predicted.